Been looking for a search engine that isn’t plauged with SEO garbage every time I look for anything. Been using DDG for quite a long time now, and I’m starting to get dissatisfied with results. It seems like more and more results are just companies trying to make their way to the top of the search results instead of anything organic. It’s even worse when I look for any kind of service or product.

Looking for as close to 100% organic results as possible.

  • @[email protected]
    12•1 year ago
    • so yeah, Google is Google, the very definition of SEO – to the point now they will completely ignore your query to show you “relevant” results
    • and Bing is Microsoft, ’nuff said – although I hear they seem to be THE choice for porn searches …
    • people have been claiming DuckDuckGo has become just a frontend for Bing which is why their results have been declining 🤷
    • ad tech company System1 owns a majority stake of Startpage – apparently they’ve mollified PrivacyTools that it would not impact Startpage’s privacy focused mission
    • Qwant out of France actually seems to be stepping up as a good netizen, not only focusing on privacy but also investing in privacy initiatives in EU
    • otherwise you’re stuck bouncing around SearX SearXNG instances – Google and Bing REALLY don’t like meta search engines and will regularly block overactive instances

    EDIT: looks like SearX is pretty much dead and had been replaced by SearXNG

    • @[email protected]
      8•1 year ago

      Qwant “The search engine that doesn’t know anything about you, …”

      Clicks on link: “Unfortunately we are not yet available in your country.”

      🤔

      • @[email protected]
        5•1 year ago

        I mean … I suppose that’s marginally better than Google’s frontpage telling me what town I’m in?

      • @[email protected]
        2•1 year ago

        I guess any site will have access to the address that is used to access them. The question is what do they do with it. Maybe Qwant has a bot that scans addresses and sends back this message if they are not operating in a specific country. Important thing is that they don’t put any cookie in your navigator and don’t keep any information after you’ve left.

    • @Geth
      2•1 year ago

      I’d be curious to understand what Qwant brings extra to the table compared to DDG. Backend is the same, results seem quite similar and it’s missing some things like math and conversion quick tools.